A change of direction

For a couple of years while we were garden contracting, my father asked us to do some work on the farm for him. The work entailed constructing a few toilets and washbasins and a couple of showers in the corner of the greenhouse for the campers use. More campers were coming over to Jersey and the long established camp sites were full to capacity. George Brasford's camp site at Bel Royal, along Victoria Avenue took as many as two hundred in his garden and the camp site at La Haule had many campers on that wonderful location over looking St Aubin's Bay George Brasford's camp site

. The camp site at La Haule

My farther wanted to start taking in campers in larger numbers. He had taken in a few and without the right facilities he could not take large numbers. The demand for camping sites were growing each year in the island and Tabor Farm with land over looking St Brelade's Bay was the idle location for a camp site. My father had taken in a few campers since 1948. He had gained a lot of experience of campers requirements and now fifteen years later he was going into camping in a big way.

He had many requests from people who said that they would like to run the camp site on commission or a wage. He took on a few of them over a period of five years, none came up to his expectations, some had let him down badly. One couple whom worked for him on a wage, could not start work before nine in the morning and would have to leave at five in the evening to be with their children. Campers, by habit, get up early in the morning and go out visiting the island and they do not come back until late in the evening. They found it difficult to pay anyone for their camping fees so they camped for free.

Success at last.

Mary and I were fortunate to have land passed for building a bungalow in 1964 on my father's land. We had been trying fort five years to get something passed on his land. After paying for the site, we needed to borrow £1,750.0s.0d.to build our home, we were able to borrow money from the States of Jersey Housing Department at four and a half percent for thirty-five years. The payments worked out at the same as we had being paying for the bungalow that we had rented for the previous six years, £5. 0s.0d. a week.

Badgers Holt, our beautiful home.

At the end of each day after gardening around the island, I would go along to our building site and start clearing it. It had been used by a small company for a few years for storing tons of car and lorry tyres. The tyres were worn right down and on most of them the tread had disappeared completely, yet they were able to re-cut fresh treads into them and sell them for a good profit.

The work clearing the site of twenty tones or so of the tyres that the company had failed to remove when they vacated the site, took me weeks to complete. I burnt all the tyres, Every night I would go along to the site and start a small bonfire. I would burn about two tons each time. I had to separate the heaps of tyres into small lots, had I burnt them all at once I would have lost control and possible have set fire to the surrounding countryside. As it was, the heat coming off the small heap was horrendous. I was able to dampen the fire down with a water that I had piped from my father's farm. I notified the Fire station that I would be having a bonfire each night for a few days, I did not think that the work would have taken so long. Smoke was a problem, because of the terrific heat coming from the fire the smoke went straight up to a great height and because I was standing by with the hose pipe playing on it continually, I had been able to change the smoke from black to light grey, making it almost invisible. I will never be able to forget the smell of that rubber. When the site had been cleared, I was able to get on with the job of setting out the profiles and start digging the foundations. I could not believe how small the rooms were going to be, I kept checking out the plans and re checking the measurements. Many of the foundations I dug were light shale and other parts were solid rock. Digging the shale were to be without problems, digging the rock was a different. I had to hire a small compressor and jack hammer and still I could not break up the rock. I purchased a long heavy crowbar and used it in the trench. Because the jackhammer had fractured the rock, I was able to praised out the rock from the footings. Had I wanted to spend more money on the building doing the trench work by using a mechanical digger, I would have had to cut out on quality on some other part of our bungalow.

The building inspector who came along from time to time was most impressed to see what I had done, digging the foundations and later filling the trenches with concrete. I can remember him saying, laughingly "the foundations are strong enough to carry a three storey house, not just a single storey bungalow" Twelve years later when I applied to have another floor added to our home, the same building inspector told the planning office that I had sufficient strength in foundations to build on. They must have been impressed by what he had told them and gave us permission within a matter of days instead of months or years as we had experienced before.

My thirty years of camping

In 1965 my camping days started when my father asked me to take on the day to day running of Tabor Farm camping site. (later to be called St Brelade Camping Park) That was a surprise to me, he must have been completely fed up with the people that he had working for him in the past. I kept a couple of my men with me to work on the camp site and over a period of three months that I took to close my gardening business down I kept the others men on to tidy up.

The first year that I started running the site we had more campers working in the island living on the site than we had holiday makers, at times only ten per cent staying on the site would be on holiday. I am sure that my father was pleased to have any number of campers, so long as he were making the camp site pay. The first couple of years running the site proved to be a difficult time for me as I wanted to reduce the number of workers living on the site for the whole summer season. My father wanted to keep them on because it was good money and he kept reminding me that they were paying my wages and I should remember that.

I wanted to run the site purely as a holiday camping site with just a few workers so as not to frighten genuine campers away because of their free for all behavior. There was nothing wrong with their behavior but when they were coming back onto the camp site at all times of the day and night making as much noise as they could, we were not going to be able to have family campers coming to us. It took about three or four few years building up a good reputation, we had to make our camp site a little different to the others. My father changed the name of the site to St Brelades Camping Park. At that time we were licensed for two hundred campers including children

We were different to other camp sites, as well as campers bringing their own tents we offered a complete camping package, all the tents were ready erected and fitted out with beds and bedding, cookers and all utensils, tables and chairs. Many of the tents were of the type used by the Boy Scouts association and the British army. The sleeping bags were filled with kapok and they took a great deal of time to dry out when they got wet. The folding chairs that we used were good quality and they were made of heavy canvas material on steel frames. The steel frames proved a bad choice. Once the chairs got wet they took a long time to dry out and the steel frames became rusted under the folds in the canvas. Unknown to us, when we took the chairs out of winter storage the following year, we found that the canvas touching the steel frames had perished, the steel had rusted right through the canvas. We had a stock of about three hundred of those chairs including spares. Every one of them had rusted so during the following winter amongst hundred of other jobs, I stripped the frames down and painted them with a special paint and replaced the rivets with bolts as the rivets had fractured because that they were not up to the job. I had canvas seats made so that they could be replaced when required.

In the late sixties my father saw that the camping park was going to be a good business investment and because of stiff competition from in and outside of Jersey he decided to invest in a large outdoor swimming pool, it was eighty feet long and thirty feet wide and four feet six inches deep. It held eighty thousand gallons of water. The pool was topped by water from our bore hole that we had had drilled a few years before. The pool was built by a company called Marshman and I think it cost around £3,500. In the planning stages my father noticed that the concrete on the bottom of the pool was going to be only six inches thick, he requested that they made the bottom double that, they included that at the same price.

The work for Marshmans was made difficult because of the soil conditions. The pool was built in the bottom of a shallow valley. They started excavating the site with a drag crane from the top of the site until they could reach no further. They then brought in a small bulldozer called a Drott weighing about five tons to push the soil over towards the drag crane. The lower they went so the wetter it became in the site. The had found the tops of three strong springs. At the same time they found that they would be digging into sticky yellow and blue clay, making the work even harder to do. Every time that they would dig into the clay with the digger the labours would have to pull the clay out of the bucket by hand to unload it. On one occasion when the men had finished for the day, they left the Drott in the bottom of the site instead of lifting it out each evening as they had done in the past. The next morning they found that the Drott had sunk down into the clay about three feet deep covering its tracks, its like the driver said "his seat was still dry" When the shell of the pool was finished and all the plumbing pipes and pumps were connected and six feet wide of concrete slabs had been laid around the pool, it was my turn to complete the work by first laying sixteen ten ton loads of ready-mix concrete over a large area, around the pool and on walkways from two inches thick with steel reinforcing mesh. I had a lot of help for that job I then laid six hundred concrete slabs with a labour supplying me with dry sand and cement mix to lay the slabs on.

Growing quickly

The pool and hiring-out tents and camping equipment and accommodating fewer people that were working in the island made us very competitive in Jersey and elsewhere. We advertised the camping park in many magazines and national news papers, because the more we advertised the more campers arrived.

Dedication, or was I a fool?

In the late sixties and the early seventies most camp sites in Europe only opened during the summer season, we were to be different, my father insisted that we would open all year round. I bitterly remember the days in the winter when I would have a call from my father after I had finished work for the day telling me to meet campers who had just arrived in the island up at the entrance to the camping park and help them to erect their tents. That was fine in good weather, but when the weather was damp, cold and sometimes raining and on some occasions freezing, I was still expected to do as he asked. Without shelter, I would have to wait sometimes for up to two hours for the campers to arrive late at night and there were times when they not arrive at all.

I did all the maintenance around the camping park during the winter months. I added more facilities such as toilets, wash basins and showers. The facilities that we offered to our camping guests far exceeded their expectations in quantity and quality. We applied and received a license to extend our numbers to five hundred campers.

Early seventies

The early seventies were the best years Jersey had ever had regarding tourism, hotels and guest houses were full, camping sites were struggling to make themselves pay. In 1972 The tourism office had twenty-eight thousand registered beds for holiday makers, not counting camping sites. (in 2004 there are only fourteen thousand beds registered and that includes hotel rooms, many of them taken up by the finance industry and now includes camp sites).

No support from the tourism department

The farming and growing industry in Jersey was struggling to stay alive. Many farmers turned to the tourism department for help. Some wanted to convert some of their outbuildings into self catering but they were turned down. I, for one in camping wanted the tourism department to advertise camping sites along with hotels and guesthouses as do France and Spain, our biggest competitors, to be told several times during the thirty years when I was managing our camping park, that "Camping in Jersey is not the right image to advertise along with hotels and guesthouses " During the summer season, May to the end of September, hotels were full most of the time, whereas camping sites were only full for the week either side of Battle of Flowers day, the last Thursday in July. After the Battle, camp sites were lucky to have their sites twenty per cent occupied during the month of August and some like ourselves because we could have taken larger numbers, were only ten per cent full.

We had been advertising in magazines and newspapers for a number of years and without that we would not have had many campers arriving.

We, as all the other campsites, wanted help from Jersey tourism, we wanted them to treat us fairly, we wanted them to do some advertising as they did with hotels and guesthouses. But we always had the same excuse.

Because of the large number of campers we were registered for with tourism, we were charged a high registration fee. I could not ever understand how they could take so much from us and give so little in return. In our last trading season in 1994, we were charged more than £2,000.00 for the registration fee. I asked again what was it for and I was told that it was for advertising.

Confirmation - they did not want campers!

Making an exhibition - of ourselves

I set up this exhibition at Empire Hall Olympia in London in 1972 to publicize our camping park in Jersey where we handed out, over one hundred thousand brochures to the camping public in eleven days. The brochures were from ourselves, of course, and we were pleased to hand them out on behalf of travel companies such as British Railways and BEA and The Jersey Tourism Office.

I remember getting to the show hall and being shown to my stand the day before the show, to set it up. Our stand was right opposite the escalator on the first floor. That was to be a big advantage as our biggest competition was from Spain, France and the UK and they were at the back of us. Well I could not believe my eyes when I saw that except for the timber work had been finished, all the paint work still had to be done. I went along to the organizes office and asked them to send a painter around to my stand immediately as I had a lot of preparation before the end of the day. A painter arrived within a couple of minutes and started apologizing for not starting on my stand as his painting company had not brought enough step ladders for all the men to use. I asked him to make a start on the lower half of the stand and I would see if I could find him something to stand on to reach to top half. To speed things up a bit I suggested that I could help him to paint the top half as I was about a foot taller than he was. He nearly had a fit, he said I would not be able to paint and that unless he did as he was told by the painters union, they would all go on strike at the show. We compromised, after he had painted the lower half and still could not find a step ladder, I cupped my hands in front of my body and I told him to jump up, like a jockey getting on a horse. I supported him all the way around the stand. Ten minutes later it was all finished, he had done a fine job. He did suggest that I might like to give him a hand, or two on all the other stands that he had to paint. In waiting for the paint to dry, I started unfurling the posters that I was going to display on the walls to find that because of the heat on the cabin floor in the aircraft when I went over to London had caused the paint to dry really hard and make the rolls almost impossible to open. They were like springs, I had to take them outside to weather them. The weather was wet and cold, but it happened to do the trick Going back indoors, I was pleased to find that the posters had softened up and I was able to straighten them out.

My painter friend had told the staff in the organizes office about the support that I had given him when he was painting and they came along to my stand and started apologizing again, I said that it was no longer a problem. They said that if I wanted any help, just give them a call. I laughed, I said I might take them up on that. The following day, Harold Wilson turned up to open the exhibition. We were all ready to receive the public, a little nervous as it was the first time I had ever done anything like exhibition work before. Things were very quite until the afternoon, when we saw more people coming up the escalator and then we were quite busy. I asked the staff on the other stands if it was going to be like this every day and they said the it was the same as that in previous years. Quite depressing, the camping public were coming into the show and spending a couple of hours down on the ground floor before coming up to us. After all the hard work and the huge expense of getting to the show and all the helpers standing around with little to do, I started thinking about doing something about getting the public upstairs to visit us before they went around the ground floor. I remember the staff in the office had said that they would give me help if I need it, well I came up with an idea, we could offer a couple of prizes in a competition.

The prizes First prize was for a family of two adults and two children to come over to our camping park with all expenses paid. They would have all the travel paid, from their homes to the camping park and return. all meals and all camping. They would have a hire car for the duration and spending money. Second prize was for the same for two adults.

I went along to the organizers office full of confidence and being prepared to be turned down with my idea of the competition because of it being short notice. They gave it a bit of thought and said, fine go ahead we will give you all the help that we can. They kept their word, they announced the competition every twenty minutes over the public address system for the next ten days and they gave instructions to the elderly gentlemen selling the show catalogs at the entrance to the show, to call out that St Brelades Camping Park in Jersey was giving away a free holiday and that the public could get more information by going up the escalator to the first floor and go along to our stand.

The organizers also agreed to give me permission to past posters advertising our competition on the whole of the frontage of the Empire Hall, Olympia absolutely free. Regretfully I was not able to have posters made up in time, the five printers that I went along to around London told me that they had too much work on and that I would have to wait at least three weeks.

The result was like a damp squib, nobody won, although the lucky numbers were announced in national news papers, no one came forward to claim the prizes.

There is a bomb

We were getting into our stride, we were handing hundreds of broaches and talking to dozens of people whom were interested in coming to Jersey in their tents or hotels. It was a busy time for us. When on two occasions during the show, I was handed a message, warning us that there maybe a bomb planted somewhere around the show. It maybe on our stand, please look around it said and went on to say do not tell anyone. I did not find one on our stand and I did not know of any other stand that had found one. They were terrible times every where that you went in London you were reminded of bombs being planted in all sorts of places, it was frightening..

It was worth the effort

We had made it. We had made the national papers, and camping magazines, we were the blue eyed boys with the President of Tourism, Senator Clarrie Dupre when we returned to Jersey after our trip to London. The Senator and the staff from Jersey's tourism's office in London came to visit us on the stand at Olympia. That was most encouraging as it was the first time and possible the last time that anyone from Jersey tourism had publicly shown any interest in camping. I must say that the rest of the time that Senator was in the hot seat, running tourism, we had his full undivided attention regarding camping. He made sure that we, I mean all camp sites, had a fair crack of the whip and were helped to publicize camping in Jersey. As soon as he left tourism, we felt as if we had the door slammed in our faces again. I believe that there are a couple of the staff are still employed by tourism, I am sure that they remember the discussions we had had with them over the years.

On a pedestal

In the late seventies we were riding high, we had recommendations from many associations such as the AA who gave us high star rating. The Camping Club International de France recommended us as the only one in the British Isles. We worked hard at camping, with or without being recognized by our tourism office, we had made it by our selves.

We catered for a thousand campers at the height of the summer season, seven hundred adults and three hundred children. We had what others described as an extraordinary array of facilities. We had a large swimming pool, a field for football and volleyball, solariums and trampolines. There was an enormous building that housed games rooms with table tennis and pool tables, TV lounges and a Disco for teenagers. In an other part we had a restaurant capable of seating over a hundred diners. Other buildings housed the laundry with washer machines, tumble driers and ironing facilities and in another we had a very busy store hiring out camping equipment. We hired out for use only on site everything from ice packs and sleeping bags to tents.

We arranged

We arranged educational games for children. I had always been able to employ teaches or teacher students who were staying with us for the summer season, they were often over in Jersey looking for employment. The teaches were able to take about 15 or so young children ages from five to twelve for two hours, twice a week. The children were of every nationality, they were encouraged to talk in their own language to each other and often they would talk about their culture and their countries, so I was told. The children enjoyed their lessons, they did paintings and general knowledge tests, someone would always have a prize at the end of the lesson, the one who won the prize was always the one who had shown to be trying hardest.

Disco time

Every Friday evening before family campers were due go home at the weekend after their holidays, we held a Disco for the junior members of the camp. It proved very popular. We employed the services of a professional disc jockey who played the latest music, but the old favorite, the dance called the conga always drew the most children onto the dance floor, the decking around the swimming pool. No sooner that dance started, there would be as many as eighty children in that line.

One sided favor

The busiest year that we had ever had on the camping park was in the early eighties when we had fourteen-hundred campers staying with us.

It was one of those years when the island was bursting at the seams with holiday makers. Tourists come over to the island for the Battle of Flowers floral event in huge numbers without booking their accommodation in advance. The tourism office were pulling their hair out, they were making frantic announcements on the media requesting short term accommodation of any type. Home owners around the island, some who had never taken in anyone before rallied around, they offered their help. Camp sites were full, they were up to their license capacity. We were able to take up to nine hundred campers, including children at that time. We had made a request for a license to take more campers as we had added more facilities. We had forty toilets, forty wash basins and forty showers and car parking for two hundred and thirty cars. The tourism office asked us to take more people in. I reminded them that we had reached the limit of our license and we would be breaking the law if we took more.

I do not think that they were worried how many people we took in, they just wanted to get them under cover. They asked us to take more. We took more. We erected an extra seventy hire tents of all types, frame and ridge tents. Almost every hour for the whole of that week we had calls from the tourism office asking us about our availability. We started by offering them fully equipped hire tents for families with children and when we ran out of cookers, tables and chairs, we were still able to give them sleeping bags and mattresses. The new un-booked arrivals were very patient, they might have had to wait as much as four hours to take possession of their tents. They were so pleased to be able to stay, some went as far as helping us to erect their tents, and the tents of others.

Car parking was a problem that week, I had to make a quick decision, we had to find extra parking space. I decided to park all the camper's cars on our land across the road from the camping park It released a grassed area of land that we had used for parking, adjacent to the park for erecting tents. Campers who had been coming to us for many years were not too happy about having to cross the road to reach their cars on the new temporary car park. As we had over three hundred cars parked there, I had two car park attendants on duty over night. The use of the temporary car park was only intended for a few weeks. Using our field as a car park upset the residents in the in their homes nearby. They wrote to the planning office to complain about the change of use of the land and everyone one of them signed the letter. The planning office could see our situation, they could see that it was only going to be short term, they could understand that we were trying to help tourism's problem. Thankfully they gave us until the end of the camping season to continue using the field for parking.

Although we had sufficient facilities for coping with the extra five hundred campers more than our tourism permit allowed when tourism requested us to help them out. It was when we applied to them for us to add an extra two hundred campers to our permit that they turned us down flat. Do not talk to me about favors.

Camping was not always appreciated

PRO BONO PUBLICO below, would have to give his name nowadays

The eighties were our best years for camping

We were one of the best run, the best facilities and location. So we were told. We must have been good, camping magazines and journals and camping associations gave us high ratings. The Camping Club of France gave us the highest camping site star rating in the whole of the United Kingdom and the AA gave us one of their highest ratings. We were often on the radio and in newspapers in different parts of Europe. We had a good long article with pictures about the camping park in a national Dutch news paper. We, that is I was interviewed by a top radio presenter, Adian Stanley for Irish Radio when he asked questions about our camping park and Jersey. A German radio presenter did the same, he interviewed me in English and he translated it into German for his listeners. I was getting used to being interviewed, my first time was in the early seventies when I was interviewed by the presenter of BBC Woman's Hour. That last one went well with family campers, it caught their attention, we had a lot of inquires for camping after that program.

The end of a season

I think that my father went too far with the rules and regulations, I was made to enforce them

Beechams Pills

We had more publicity when Beechams Pills chose our camping part to film one of their advertisements. I had to erect a dozen tents of all types close together to make the camping park look busy in March. I remember the weather being bitterly cold when the film company turned up to film. Dr Beecham came with them, he liked Jersey so much that he used the opportunity to come over that time to watch them filming. The two actors in the film certainly earned their money, they had to repeat their lines time and time again to get them right. All they had to do was to sit at a camping table dressed in light weight summer clothes. The man had to cough and the woman jumped up and went into the tent and came out, holding aloft a tube of Beechams Pills and saying something like "this is what you need for your cough" I think that everyone there would have wanted those pills after having to wait around for three hours in such a low temperature. That film went all around Britain for years, that helped to put us on the map.

"Don't cough over that, have a pill". (Beecham's actors)

More Publicity

We took part in the Battle of Flowers Event. Children and adults wanted to take part in the carnival class that year when a gentleman, I cannot remember his name, came into reception one day and told me that if I was interested, he would be willing to organize a group to take part in the event the following year. I must admit that I had not seen the Battle of Flowers for over thirty years and I did not know how to go about it. He convinced me that he could see it through as he had been involved in events like that on the mainland. He kept to his word, he was self employed at home and he said that he would happily take an extra week off from work to help to organize the group. He and his wife worked hard, they managed to find a lot of highly skilled campers to help them. There were choreograph teachers and seamstresses and volunteers able to do all kind of chores come forward from all around the camping park to help. That was a big event, many of the campers asked if they could sit together to watch to the cavalcade, that got me thinking. We could have our own stand, we could advertise the camping park on it.

Some of the Royal bridesmaids

I arranged for SGB to hire out to us three articulator type trailers and erect seating made up of scaffolding and timber planking. It was a very solid construction, it was large enough to sit one hundred and thirty people. We did not have any problem filling them. We had banners attached advertising the park along with hundreds of our helium filled balloons and it towering over all the other makeshift stands.

Balloons The stand came alive when we took along eight hundred helium filled balloons with our adverting message printed on them. Half a dozen of the campers had volunteered to start filling the balloons at six am that day. They were in fits of laughter most of the time as every time anyone would go pass them as they were working on the balloons, so they would take a gulp of the gas and give an imitation of Donald Duck. Thankfully I had ordered twice as much gas that I needed as each time the campers went passed, they would also take a gulp of the gas. From then on everyone had the giggles for the rest of that day.

Tee-shirts The hundred tee-shirts that I had ordered earlier arrived just in time for the campers to ware at the Battle of Flowers event. I remember one family buying as many as fourteen shirts. I must have sold over two hundred of them on couple of days leading up to the event. They were all going to be seen in public, in a big way. The shirts were plain white with a message in bold lettering on the back. Happiness is staying at St Brelade's Camping Park

What a day

What a day! Fourteen bridesmaids, two page boys and a bride and groom. The camping park had been buzzing for two weeks leading up to Jersey's event of the year. This year we were going to take on the best in the show in the cavalcade class. We had put a lot of money into advertising the camping park in the past but never as much as we had this time in one go.

I hired the bride's dress and the young man's pageboy outfits and I had bought thirty feet of curtain netting material seven feet wide to be made into a train for the bride. I was sent off to buy fourteen tee shirts in white for the bridesmaid's outfits and Paris pink dye to colour them. I decided to delegate to others the rest of the shopping when I was asked to go and buy fourteen petticoats and white shoes for the youngsters. A lot of material was used on the dresses, the helpers who had gone shopping were not able to find certain items so they adapted the materials that they had. They bought three feet wide lengths of white satin curtain material and cut it into twelve inch wide lengths to create cummerbunds. Ornate cotton netting was used for trimming the outfits and I was again sent out on a buying spree to buy fourteen wicker baskets and dozens of carnations and pinks for decoration. The pinks were used on the brides train, I spread the train out on the ground and I scatted about a dozen of them onto the material and I asked if they could be sown in place.

I and others then set about making hoops of flowers for the bridesmaids to carry along with the wicker baskets attached to them. I used about eight strands of wire to make the hoops and twisted them for strength. They were delicately decorated with pinks and carnations and gypsophila.

Everyone on the camping park appeared to be involved in doing something to help during the two weeks, there was an expert for everything, whether it was doing makeup or rehearsing the youngsters to act as if they were doing the thing for real. The youngest learnt very quickly, they were keen to learn. The bride and the groom were cajoled into doing their bit. I can remember for the two weeks leading up to the big day, the bride telling me that she did not like dressing up and that she preferred wearing jeans and that she did not really want to do it.

I saw the bride first thing in the morning of our big day with a long face, she did not look very happy, she did not even speak to me, I thought that she might be giving me a hint that she was going to walk out on us. A little later I saw her with a hairdresser who was camping with us, doing her hair, another volunteer was giving her a manicure and there was another waiting to do her makeup.

The groom was looking splendid in the navel officer's uniform that I had borrowed from a friend, he really looked the part, especially with the sword he was wearing at his side. Whereas, the bride did not want to wear her bride's cloths, the groom did not want to get out of his.

All appeared to be going well with the preparations on the camp and I felt that I might be needed down at the arena with our campers on our stand. Campers were streaming down towards the arena early that day to get a good seat so I managed to hitch a lift with one of them. I could not believe my eyes as we were going along the road to see that our balloons were everywhere. They were tied onto road signs and barriers the were even tied onto policemen who were controlling traffic, there even five balloons tied either side of the entry to the arena. When I asked the police who had persuaded them to take the balloons, they said that they were approached by a couple of gorgeous young ladies who had asked them nicely, to do them a favour. The girls also suggested that they might like to ware a Camping Park tee-shirt.

As I went into the arena and started walking along towards our stand, I was amazed to see that it had been given the same treatment as the road signs, it had our yellow balloons with our logo message, tied all over it. It looked fantastic, it was lively and bright, it made people look at it, I was so proud. The campers had done a fine job, they had even tied bright colored flags of all nations and large silver bows on it.

When the cavalcade of exhibits started moving along the arena with bands playing and crowds cheering, we were looking out for our own entry, our little band of campers, when we saw in the distance a group of people being loudly cheered on by the crowds, they were our people, they were getting some of the loudest applauds that afternoon. The group were being led our bride and groom followed by the fourteen bridesmaids and the two handsome pageboys. As they got closer to us, the campers on our stand got very excited especially when they saw that we had won our class.

The young lady that I had seen only a few hours before wearing jeans and a sad face was now in the limelight, she looked beautiful in her wedding dress with her beautiful coiffeured hair, she was smiling and waving to the crowds and thoroughly enjoying herself as did the groom. The bridesmaids were the star attraction, they performed their duties like professionals considering the short time that had been learning and their young ages. The youngest being five years and the eldest twelve. They had to leave holding the brides train one by one to present a carnation button hole from the baskets they were carrying and curtsy to elderly ladies in the crowds bordering the arena. They did that for nearly two hours, the crowds loved it.

Our entry in the Battle of Flowers was called Andrew and Fergie, it was topical of the time, it was popular with the crowds as the Royals had only recently married.

Neighbours complained

One night after the pubs closed there was a terrible noise of youths shouting and fighting each other coming from the entrance of the camping park.

Thinking that they were from the park, I approached them at the same time as our local police. The police broke up the fighting and told them to move on, thinking that they were from the park, herded them onto our land.

I did not recognize any of them, knowing that we did not take in any single young people at that time, we were only taking families and mixed couples. The police told me that they were from the camping park because the neighbours had telephoned them and told them so. It just happened that the twenty or thirty of them started auguring and fighting outside of our entrance, on their way to St Helier. The neighbours complaining that time was nothing new, they complained every year about noise coming from the main road, they always suspected that the noise had been coming from our campers.

Big bang ..... quite a coincidence

Sports day That sports day was a day that anyone who attended could never forget. The climbing equipment and the equipment that was going to be used in the swimming pool had been made ready the day before. It was a full day event with many campers taking part. The whole event was organized by the same fellow and his family that had organized our Battle of Flowers entry the previous year.

Big secret..... nobody told me I had been approached a week before by the officer in charge of a group from the parachute regiment who were staying Jersey. The officer and his family were staying with us. He told me that a couple of his men had had nasty accidents one being fatal when they had been practicing dropping with their parachutes. He went on to explain that his men needed to have their minds taken off the recent incidences and would I mine if they were to help out on our sports day. How could I refuse help like that. I explained that if his men could be on site between eight and nine the morning of the sports day, they would be shown what to do.

They arrived They arrived alright, dead on eight hundred hours, they came with their own transport, Land Rovers and trailers and one towing a gun. Once on site they started assembling their armoury onto their vehicles, they fitted machine guns and other bits and pieces with the help of the campers children. The children, the campers and myself just could not believe what we were seeing, it was like a good dream, the regiment officer had kept this invasion a good secret, even from me.

Howitzer start The sports events started with the tiny tots sack race dead on nine o'clock. That was an event the children, the campers and the neighbours will never forget, that race was started by firing the big Howitzer cannon that they had towed up with them. Unfortunately the cannon had been taken up near the main road and pointing towards the neighbours houses was fired and all the packing inside of the blank shell, it was like confetti, flew right over their houses and onto their gardens. Not one of the neighbours complained about the noise as they had the night before when the police were called. Come to think about it now, I cant remember them ever complaining about noise from the camping park after that.

An advertisement I made up earlier

Just Jazz

We had a lot of talented people staying on the camping park over the years. One time we had a group of jazz musicians called The Dutch Jazz Band, they were an university band, they had come over to the island to play at a few prestigious events. They were accompanied by a professional female singer and they were over for a week.

It was suggested to me by someone that had seen them playing that they might like to play for the campers one evening, I liked that idea and negotiated terms that suited us. As I had not heard them play, I did not if the camper would really appreciate their style.

We arranged an early evening do when they had to do a performance later somewhere else. The idea was that they set up their music stands at the swimming pool side where there was plenty of space and campers could hear them performing.

Well, they started playing at six-thirty as advertised to a couple of dozen campers who were sitting and standing about and not showing too much interest in the proceedings and within thirty seconds of them playing there must have been a hundred people clambering to get near them to watch their performance. I think that it started with Glen Miller style music, that had captured the mood of the campers, because within a few more minutes many more had joined them, they had left their half eaten meals in their tents and in the restaurant to take part in the musical experience. I telephoned our family and friends to come and share the music, neighbours from all around the camping park came over to hear it.

Young and old loved it

They loved it more when after the musicians after they had been playing for about an hour, they changed into something a little more comfortable while still playing their instruments.

Support

From time to time An opportunity came along for us to have some publicly. Chris Dawkins was one of those who had done well for himself. He was the British junior go-cart champion and his ambition was to race cars. Because he was competing around the U.K. and the Continent, I thought that it would be to our benefit and ask him to advertise the camping park on his racing outfit.

Quality improved

The quality of tents and camping equipment improved over the years that I had been involved in camping and the price increased at the same time. In the early sixties we started with secondhand tents that cost £2.10s.0d. and just before we closed the camping park down, we were paying over £500.00.each and that was buying in bulk For an example in the early years we would have paid thirty shillings for a new table, when we were coming up to closing, we had been paying as much as £50.00. I can remember starting on the camping park with ten tents. Two or three of them were the small bivovac type and the others were made up of bell tents and tents that would have not looked out of place in the middle ages. The tents that I had to use were in a terrible condition, they had been stored in a loft from the year before I took over. They had been been packed away wet and dirty and some even had oil and grease from cooking still sticking to them. I suspected that they had been taken down without too much care. When I say that we had ten tents, I should have said, bits and pieces of tents, all the poles had been bundled together and as they had not been labeled, it took me awhile to sort them out.

My father suggested that I should erect all the tents so that I would get used to them, I had never put a tent up in my life before. I did not know what to expect when I started. When I was handling the canvas of all the tents, I thought that they had a foul smell and being that I was not used to handling tents, I would have thought that it was a smell I would have to get used to. I started with one of the larger tents. I laid the canvas out on the ground and crawled underneath in the dark with the poles, where I found the holes to put the spikes through on the end of the poles. In those days the tents were made of heavy duty canvas and when I was trying to erect them, the creases would have to be straightened out, more so because they had been put away wet. As I started lifting the canvas of my first tent to insert the poles and at the same time straightened the creases, I felt a tickle down the inside of my shirt, I thought that it was a lump of grass that had fallen off the tent and took little notice as I was concentrating on erecting the tent. My waist was starting to itch and I started to scratch it, when I got a nasty nip, I got out from under the canvas and pulled my shirt out of my trousers to see what was biting me, laying on the ground were several baby mice with their mother, I had disturbed them from their nest in one of the creases in the canvas.

That tent and the remainder of them had mouse holes or were needing attention before I would be able to erect them. I washed them with plain water to try and get the mouse smell out, it did not make any difference, the smell stayed with them until they were replaced. I had taken them to be repaired but the tent repairers asked me to take them away as the the smell was so bad.

I was being spoilt .... with new tents

The first time my father had ordered new tents was a historic moment, Unknown to me he had ordered six tents of different types. He chosen them more for their price and size than for their stability and long lasting quality. Because the tent manufactory's had made the tents for a low price, they had used lightweight material and the tent frames were not strong enough to hold the tents up in a strong wind. Everything was wrong with the them. The tent pegs were just bits of bent wire and the guy lines broke down in the sunlight in only a few weeks as did the plastic/rubber rings that anchored the tent to the ground. The plastic tent zips broke down within a month, again due to sunlight and were replaced with brass ones. Our first new tents would have to last at least three seasons to make them profitable. If my time was counted dismantling and re-erecting and re allocating the campers into other hire tents with all their equipment, repairing the tents, in the case of broken zips, I might have just sown on tapes or I might have used an adhesive tape to patch up holes in the canvas, they would have had to last ten years to have made a profit.

In the earliest days of hiring tents I would erect six to ten tents, some only eight by four feet, and in the heyday of us hiring ready erected tents, I could put up as many as one hundred and twenty frame tents up by myself, most of them fourteen by fourteen feet square. I preferred to do that as I felt at the time that no one knew how to erect them as well as I did. I was proved wrong. When I had back problems and I was having treatment every day, I had to rely on my staff to take over the tents and under my supervision, of course, they were erecting them as good or even better than I had been doing over the years.

Just got better Over the years, camping equipment improved, from the time when I had been patching up and repairing wooden chairs with splinters in them, tables with spindly legs and ready to collapse, kapok filled sleeping bags that would never dry out in time to use and cookers that were not designed with safety in mind to tents that would last four or five years and needing little attention, plastic arm chairs and tables, plug-in electricity points, cookers that were barely used as the campers preferred to use the restaurant, the snack-bar or the BBQ and sleeping bags could be opened out and used as duvets.

Large Stock We held a large stock of hire equipment during the late eighties, including one hundred and eighty tents, one hundred frame and the remainder dome tents, five to six hundred plastic armchairs and seven hundred sleeping bags. Travel agents Although we were doing well with our ready erected hire tents, we had the opportunity to take on a couple of travel agents who wanted to have their own ready erected tents in addition to ours on our camping park. That proved most successful.

Sadly

In the mid eighties, sadly, my father passed away suddenly. He is greatly missed by the family. He was a good grandfather, always finding time for the little ones, and giving advice to his children. He had many friend who used to call in to his home every day. He was a popular and generous man. He would always have time the listen to his friends problems and he would often offer them financial support.

My work included

In the early days of running the camping park, I took it for granted that part of my work was to do all the maintenance and construction on the the site darning the winter months and just do only a little as the season got busier and I would have to concentrate on the day to day running of the site. I had not expected to be the toilet cleaner, receptionist and night-watchman.

In those days the site would open in March and the first campers would arrive at six in the morning from the passenger mail boat. I would meet them at what was laughingly called the reception office. It doubled up as a camping equipment hire shop and and store room for bottled gas. Entry to the "office" was through a wooden up and over door that was difficult to open at times when the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. My father had had help in erecting the "office" a couple of years before I started working for him on the site. He and his help had built up the walls of the "office" and placed the roof into position on their first day. When they returned the following day, they were a little upset to see that their work had collapsed in a heap on the ground. The structure was designed to be used as a small single car garage and it was built at a low cost. It was made with heavy duty asbestos sheeting on the walls and corrugated asbestos sheeting on the roof. As it turned out, the lightweight softwood frame holding the sheets together were not strong enough to carry the weight of the roof. I used the shabby "office" for a number of years. It needed attention after strong winds had moved the sheeting from their frames and where water regularly came in through the roof and the side walls. So much damaged had been done to the materials of the little building as it was being built that it would have been better if it had been put to one side and a new one built if my father could have afforded it.

Entering my home of fifteen years with my little daughter. Notice the nearly new panels on the front of "my office" They had been salvaged from another building.

Years later we built a new (or nearly new) camp reception office from discarded window panels from a local hotel.

I knew that running the camp site was not going to be easy, with the shortage of funds and by past experience of working for my father with his stubborn ways. The sewage system had a lot to be desired, the waste water from the eight toilets, eight wash hand basins and a cloth washing machine, ran into a steel barrel that had been buried in the ground, from that, it was piped away towards the open area where tents were to be erected. The idea was that the effluent would soak-away into a French drain. The drain was a trench about thirty feet long, six feet and three feet wide and filled with large stones and covered over with old corrugated iron sheeting and a few inches of soil. When the drain had become so saturated that it would no longer work, I would have to dig further into the field when the system failed. Every day without fail, I would have to be on standby darning the busy period of the day to make sure that the effluent was getting away.

We carried on with that system for a further two years until I was able to persuade my father to buy a pump to pump the effluent up to a purpose built soak-away of eighty feet long. It was more of a compromise, he bought a small Stuart Turner pump, capable of pumping about four hundred gallons an hour of clean water. As it was not designed to pump solids as we intended. When started up we found that it would only pump one hundred gallons an hour, that was about forty to fifty flushes of the toilets, at least that was an improvement on the previous system. Things improved over the thirty years that I had been running the site, from having to put up with just a soak-away, to having a Rolls Royce quality system capable of pumping seventy gallons a minute.

Between camping seasons

Every year I did the maintenance on the camp site almost single handed. Without boasting, I installed all the fresh and foul water systems, I did all the plumbing, sometimes having to use secondhand pipes and fittings.

All the swimming pool filtration systems that we had used over the years had been secondhand until the last few years, when I installed some of the latest equipment available. The first lot of steel pipes I used were rusted on to each other and had to be freed with easing oil so that I could have used them. The larger of the pipes some being six inches in diameter were the must rusted as they had been underground in their previous installation. Although the gate valves had been manufactured in bronze before the war, it was only when they had been fitted and in use that the metal started breaking up and disintegrating. That caused me a lot of trouble especially since we were still short of funds at that time and I was not able to replace them with new ones.

I always went along to my favourite supplier of metal fittings, Hunt Bros the scrap merchant dealers, they could normally get me out of trouble at times of need with pipe fittings.